Phone extremely slow upon reception of images via Signal

Well, this is some important news. Does your wife use regular Android or a custom rom like Lineage?
If she also uses Signal with GCM, I wonder if the problem could be related to your Wifi or your network coverage. Did you make some tests with or without wifi? Or on another wifi? With or without cellular network (for example a whole day/evening in airplane mode with wifi on)?

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She has the Android 9 (or 8?) that came with the phone, no custom ROM. For me it has happened in different WiFi networks already and I’m just thinking if it happened in mobile data, too. Can’t remember anymore but will keep an eye on this.
Since in the end it’s a phone that we are talking about I wouldn’t like to put it into flight mode for the whole day.
I found at least one more report about this behavior in the Play Store user comments about the app but there we don’t know any more preconditions like OS etc.

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Maybe it will be fixed in the next official release of Signal, namely version 5.21.6:

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Doesn’t seem to be the same issue though… In this case it’s only when sending a picture for the first time by MMS and doesn’t freeze the whole phone.

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You are right. However, there is an update of Signal available in the Google Play Store, released yesterday…

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Yes, if I open the Play Store in Firefox I can see a version 5.21.6 from September 1. When I open the Play Store app the last update is from August 23 but the version is 5.21.6, too. Now I’m not sure if this data is puzzled because I installed the APK from the Signal website. But at least it pretty much looks like I already got the latest version (in the app under help I can see this, too) if their version strings are not wrong.
Apart from that I didn’t get many pictures via Signal during the last days, so no new findings.

One more remark on that topic: As the latest update didn’t fix the issue for me I went into the settings and disabled the automatic download of pictures, videos and everything. Now I still get a notification for incoming media but I need to tap onto it to download the content. Since then I didn’t have my phone blocked by Signal anymore. It’s rather a workaround than a solution but for me that’s perfectly fine.

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I do not use Signal, but in case someone does and reads your post, I guess it will be much appreciated. Thanks a lot!

Hello!
Thanks for the workaround, I had the exact same issue for a few months and it was really frustrating, even with latest versions (OS 21.10.0-rel2 / Signal 5.26.11).
I still hope that Signal team will provide a reliable fix for this in the near future but I will keep this settings in the meantime.

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